Aureolin No 40
by coincident
Summary: In the art world, as in life, you buy yourself in before you sell yourself out. SasoDei/AU/one-shot.


**A/N: **I was having lunch today with some art student friends, and suddenly the half-conceived SasoDei in my head resolved itself into a story that I could barely get down on paper fast enough. So here it is--a story in two timelines about life together in the world of art.

Some of you might be wondering why I'm wasting time churning out one-shots when I should be updating chapters. Shockingly, I have a reason: characterization practice, so the chapters aren't complete crud :) So bear with me here, and look for updates on multi-chapters sometime late next week.

In the meantime, let me know what you think, and I hope you enjoy this!

* * *

**~X~**

"What is that?" asks Sasori, staring at the monstrosity still half-covered in blue tarp that has suddenly, inexplicably taken up residence in their living room. Deidara barely spares him a glance.

"It's a harp, yeah. What does it look like?"

"I can see that. Why is it here?"

"Itachi gave it to me."

Sasori closes his eyes, half-expecting that when he opens them again the harp will be gone and there will be nothing there but paint-flecked pine floorboards, as it should be. This would not be unusual, and it would be a hell of a lot more welcome at this hour in the morning than a fucking _harp_ in the middle of the living room, blithely emerging out of its blue vinyl covering like a bizarre interpretation of Venus on the half-shell. Deidara is energetically removing crinkly packing material from the base; he's making little appreciative noises and passing his hands over the harp's wooden body, and Sasori feels a manic urge to seize the container of Carmine no. 62 that's sitting on his easel table and fling it in his roommate's face.

"Why did Itachi give you a harp?"

"Because if he hadn't I would've just taken it, yeah."

Deidara answers his questions with a faintly puzzled air, head cocked lightly to the side, like a puppy that can't understand why its owner refuses to play with it. The urge to make projectiles of all his paint cans grows, but Sasori ignores it with dignity and simply crosses over to his easel. He takes a seat and resolves to wait patiently for Deidara to explain on his own. The harp is now completely out of the blue tarp and stands proudly in the middle of the living room, shedding packing peanuts and curls of Styrofoam from its varnished teak frame, and with a little wail of ecstasy Deidara bounds forward and drags his fingers over the now accessible strings, releasing a noise so hideous Sasori actually gnashes his teeth. Patience be damned.

"Deidara. You don't know how to play the harp."

"Itachi's going to teach me, yeah. He knows everything, you know--I have this theory that he's sold his soul to the devil in exchange for infinite knowledge, yeah?"

He decides he'll have words with Itachi later and explain to him the truly serious crime he has just committed, possibly intentionally to make Sasori lose what little sanity he still maintains.

"…What prompted you to learn how to play the harp?"

Deidara is now plucking each individual string with a look of complete rapture on his face, the look that precedes extravagant painting benders and utterly bad ideas, such as the time he decided to dye half of Sasori's hair green in his sleep and let him go to class in the morning completely unaware that anything was amiss. It's the same kind of look, radiant and a definite indicator that something in Deidara's mind is fatally unhinged, and Sasori passes a hand over his eyes in frustration before realizing that Deidara is actually responding to his question.

"So I was at this music festival the other day--the one you didn't go to, because you were working on that bridge series in oils, yeah? And there was this indie group, right--Root, I think it was called, they did this like, _orgasmic _number with a tambourine and an electric violin and a harp? The harp was this chartreuse color, which was really neat, yeah--"

"Deidara."

"Right, right! So anyway, we went to this café with them after, 'cause the harpist--Sai, yeah--he's friends with Itachi's little brother's best friend's girlfriend's--"

"Deidara."

"I'm _getting _there! So he was telling me about harps, yeah? And this is the cool thing about harps…You see all the strings? They all have to be tuned differently for playing and storage, because--because, well, something happens, okay--and if you don't do it right, you know what happens _then_?"

Sasori has a sudden, sickening idea of where this is going.

"No."

"It EXPLODES!" shrieks Deidara, banging out a frenetic and terrifying rhythm on the harpstrings. "Fucking _explodes, _can you believe it? And it's a harp, yeah! It's a _classical instrument_! They play it in symphony orchestras and stuff, and all that time it's just sitting there like this bomb waiting to go off! Itachi made me get this one tuned before I left, though, so I don't think it's going to--"

"You brought home Itachi's harp in hopes that it would _explode_?"

Deidara considers this, twisting a sheaf of golden hair into his fingers before releasing it all at once and letting it drop. It glitters over his shoulders, a cloak diffused with sunlight and dust motes. "Well, no, but that's not a bad--"He begins muttering to himself and running a finger along the wood, blatantly against the grain.

Sasori turns without a word and stalks to the kitchen, where he grabs his keys off their hook and retrieves his jacket from the back of a chair.

"Where are you going?"

"_I'm _not going anywhere. You're coming with me and we're returning that harp to Itachi this second. Get your coat on."

Deidara ignores him so blatantly he wonders why he even tries. He attempts to take his forearm, but Deidara simply laughs his silvery laugh and asks him to help pick up the packing peanuts, and Sasori, like the idiot that he is, kneels to the ground and begins scraping them off the floor, dropping them into an empty can to use for transporting paintings to galleries.

In the end the harp stays, and Sasori is reassured by Itachi's wry voice on the line that the possibility of explosion lies in the soundboard--whatever that is--and not the strings, so Deidara's harp is not in danger of exploding anytime soon, despite what he may have heard from the dubious 'Sai' character. Deidara decides to cover the instrument with neon-blue fish and sequins, supposedly basing it off some children's book he deeply enjoyed as a child, and it sits in the corner of their living room like a deceptively ostentatious, exotic showpiece, attracting conversation and coos of admiration whenever they entertain. Sasori checks its strings and adjusts the thermostat in the room every day, as Itachi suggests, and even covers it with the blue tarp before going to sleep, but he's never able to shake the suspicion that one day the balance of taut, fragile tension and heavy wooden solidity will simply fail, and the instrument will blow itself to pieces in the living room despite all of Itachi's steady reassurances. Of course, this possibility of beauty and functionality destroyed is what Deidara likes best.

"It's art, yeah," he says to Sasori, nuzzling his shoulder from behind as he snakes his hands forward to bat at the strings. "It's art."

**~X~**

Sasori doesn't know how Deidara came to live with him in the first place, but it probably had something to do with the fact that his living room is eighty-five square feet of pure artist's wet dream, with open picture windows facing the opera house downtown and dozens of incandescent, flexible bulbs, which can be positioned directly over an easel or away from it to provide different approximations of gallery lighting. It was a studio like many professional artists hadn't had at the time, let alone students, and Deidara began keeping his brush sets and drafting pencils there before he ever moved on to his toothbrush, boxers, and shaving cream. Sasori had never suggested it; Deidara had simply done it, encroaching on his personal space until it wasn't his anymore. He hadn't minded at the time. He'd liked being able to look up as he walked past the east side of thebuilding and see two easels splitting the expanse of empty space, two chairs propped up by the sad student dining table, two names on the brass-rimmed mail slot in front.

Sasori had been a meticulous and almost mathematical artist at the time, spreading plastic around his workspace, laying drafting pencils in neat parallel lines according to weight and thickness, and covering paintings with cloth shields against the sunlight when he went to classes. He never displayed his work. Once it was drafted and outlined he colored each area precisely with Prismacolor pencils, only then beginning to paint, with small feathered strokes of slim brushes. He had liked the idea of reproducing a painting exactly as it was in his mind, and he measured his growing skill by how close the finished product was to the vision of it that had existed in his imagination.

Before Deidara that was what his artistic life had been--pencils in their cases, handwritten memos to replenish color-wheel organized stores of paint, brushes washed immediately after a painting was finished. Evenings spent taking gallery-quality photos and staring at them in his portfolio, immortalized there in a way they never were standing drying on his easel. He had never used the huge pine-floored studio to its full extent.

"How the hell did you get a place like this?" Deidara had asked in the early days, when he was so ecstatic at the spacious freedom that he would do things like lay giant sheets of drafting paper on Sasori's floor and coat his rollerskates in paint and fly down the living room, crashinginto furniture and laughing furiously when paint speckled the walls.

"My grandmother finances it," Sasori had replied. "She has always been supportive of my artistic career."

Deidara had cackled delightedly at that, and then he'd grabbed Sasori's hands and pulled him with him onto the sheet of paper, spinning him around over the paint until Sasori's khakis were covered in swirls of color and his protesting voice silenced by breathlessness and a feeling he wasn't quite sure he could name, not yet. And then Deidara had tangled sticky orange fingers in his hair and pulled him towards him and kissed him soundly, and he wasn't aware of his knees giving out until they were both flush against the wet multicolored surface, mouths melded together as their fingers drew vibrant, uncontrolled designs against each other's skin.

"I'm so not washing this, yeah," Deidara had declared afterwards, holding up the paint-streaked shirt Sasori had divested him of early in the encounter. "I'm putting it in my portfolio and calling it 'Sasori Has a Sex Drive After All, The Bastard,' yeah!"

And then Sasori couldn't resist laughing too, because it really was ridiculous, Deidara's shirt covered in his last reserves of expensive Holbein acrylics, and both of them lying naked in the sunshine on a huge sheet of drafting paper in his living room, and the insane pride that had spiralled up within him as he realized this disaster of a love was the first spontaneous work of art he could ever remember creating.

He'd understood, at that moment, what the appeal of Deidara's sort of transience was-- something about the knowledge that after they had gotten up and put their clothes on and cleaned up the mess in his living room, the feeling of accomplishment would remain with him in the most paradoxically permanent of ways.

It was enough to make him set aside the business of gallery photos for a few months and do things with his evenings that he had never done before; painting murals on his walls, buying vases and placemats for the table, suppressing a smile at the long golden hairs caught in his shower drain. In the evenings on campus he and Deidara had gone together to the student workspaces, commandeering a table for themselves and drawing complacently until there was no one else in the room. And Sasori had said things he usually didn't say and felt things he usually didn't feel; he had learned to recognize Deidara's green coat tossed over a chair in a classroom or Deidara's unbounded laugh from halfway across the university dining hall, and it was art--it was definitely art; all it needed was a medium of capture.

It was in those days that he had decided he wanted to paint him.

**~X~**

After the incident with the harp, Sasori is adamant that he will not speak to Deidara until he realizes what an utter idiot he is. This resolution is abruptly derailed when he remembers that he has to take Deidara to an auction at Christie's on Tuesday, despite the fact that Deidara hates auctions and has only agreed to go on the condition that Sasori will accompany him to one of the disturbing performance art shows he loves so dearly, and which take place in the student quadrangle on a regular basis. Sasori agrees to this mainly because he's tired of arguing about it, and also because he wants Deidara to go to the auction for the purposes of old-fashioned desperate networking, the keystone of the art student experience no matter how good an artist is. Deidara hasn't sold a single painting in the past year, although painting is his concentration at the design school, and when asked, he says he is composing an epic abstract series that is beyond the commercial acumen of any dealer in New York City.

Sasori finds this highly unlikely, as all Deidara has been working on lately is some kind of obscure kinetic sculpture that involves a live ferret and several crates of pool balls, and which seems to necessitate absolute and total inebriation before he manages to make any progress on it.

Christie's is crowded on Tuesday, filled with the sounds of clinking champagne flutes and nervous men and women chattering away on cell phones--bidding agents, speaking to their unseen buyers and speculating tensely on lot prices and what other buyers are potentially on the scene today. In the gallery, the flash of red paddles is visible as people eye their watches and one another with the same bubbling hostility. Sasori can hear eight languages he recognizes and some he doesn't; the Christie's crowd is surprisingly select, and most of the participants are jet-setters who fly out to the auction house from their various opulent international houses to participate in the day's sales before flying immediately back. Once the gavel comes down on a particular painting, it goes straight into the collections of one of these wealthy patrons, and then Sasori knows the real beauty begins, because a painting in a famed collection becomes more than a work of art: it becomes immortal.

Once a painting takes its place in an important collection, it can't be touched. It's transported from museum to museum in armored trucks, riddled with anti-theft devices that release corrosive poison in the faces of potential thieves; it's admired and passed on for generations to come; it's restored by worshipful apprentice painters when its beauty begins to dim with age.

Sasori doesn't care how much time he loses taking gallery photographs and attending auctions, because once he gets a painting into a collection, it will live forever, and he will have all the time in the world.

Deidara sits at his side in one of the spartan folding chairs, making a horrible screeching noise on the rim of his champagne flute and apparently not impressed in the least. Sasori shoots a glare at him and he stops, tosses his drink back, and flounces off to set the small goblet on one of the end tables.

"This is stupid, yeah," he says in his extravagant voice, much to the irritation of other buyers. "It's like a fucking art whorehouse, or something! Can't we just go home and--"

"No," snaps Sasori. "And you should really be watching. Someday you'll have a painting here too, and you want to know how it works, don't you?"

"Don't confuse me with yourself, yeah?" says Deidara in one of his rare displays of maddening clarity, and settles back in his chair, starting a game of Snake on his cell phone.

Sasori has a feeling that the only reason Deidara hasn't been outright banned from Christie's is because of his immense presentability; it always looks good for the auction house to be able to feature such a photogenic young man in pieces of photojournalism, especially when he is theoretically an up-and-coming artist himself. Deidara fits the exact image of the public conception of artists--beautiful, young, slightly mad, a genius like a firecracker that can flare into brilliance or peter out at any given moment, throwing the rest of the mundane world into sharp relief against his brilliance. In his androgynous black turtleneck and rust-colored leather jacket, Deidara looks affluent and casual, two things which Sasori knows he isn't, but the impression is conveyed and the sea of intense upper-class faces levels curious glares at him as people take their seats around them.

The auction begins, and for a moment Deidara is intrigued, not by the concept but by the universal crowd-quieter--the way the lights dim and the slides resolve themselves into images on the projection screen.

"Hey, check that out, yeah? The guy on the podium's got a _corsage _on, Sasori! Doesn't he kinda look like a pimp?"

"That's the auctioneer, Deidara."

"See, see? Art whorehouse. God, I would never put a painting in here if I--"

_"Deidara_. Keep your voice down."

"Yeah, okay. Hey, what are all those--are those _telephone booths_?"

"Those are Christie's agents, bidding on behalf of people who aren't here."

"Well, why didn't we just do that, yeah?"

"Because we aren't here to buy."

"What are we here for, then?"

"Just keep your mouth shut and watch, Deidara."

The lots go by. Sasori hears the numbers escalating with each lot and it's wonderful, really, a spectacle on a grand scale--the rush of these people to finance others' dreams of immortality. As the gavel raps out its beat of finality, Sasori feels the urge to applaud, and as the paddles flash with the gleam of manicured nails and expensive watches and money, he takes Deidara's hand in his and interlocks their fingers together, feeling a pleasure that he hasn't felt in weeks. And finally, it's--

"Lot seventy-nine is an oil painting by a senior graduate student at New York University, Sasori Akasuna--"

And there it is, on the screen, immortalized and identical to the day he finished it, his first really spectacular oil painting: a desert scene of a tower surrounded by swirling, glittering sand. Sasori has to bite back the exuberance he feels at the sight of it _here_, at the most famous auction house in New York--the painting has never seemed so beautiful as it does now, coveted by others. For a second everything else in the room is a peripheral consideration, even Deidara's hand in his, and all he can see is the oils made pixels on the screen, illuminating his face like a cutout window of light in a dark room.

And then--

"What the hell? It's not for sale, yeah!"

Deidara is _standing up_ in the auction hall, with his golden hair flying as if run through by electricity. His bright eyes are wide with indignation, and Sasori feels his insides grow cold.

"_Deidara," _he hisses._ "_Sit down."

"That's his best painting, yeah!" yells Deidara, completely ignoring him. "It's _not _for sale!"

The auctioneer, a red-haired young man with multiple piercings, is clearly not amused. "If you wish to place a bid, sir, you will have to follow the proper procedure--"

"Like hell I will, yeah!" snaps Deidara, and he whirls around to face the assembled audience as if daring someone to challenge him. Sasori catches the hem of his jacket and yanks, hard, but Deidara slaps his hand away and marches to the front of the room, where he casts his eyes around wildly in a futile search for the slide projector. Sasori knows he won't find it, and cursing his luck, he leaps to his feet and runs after him. But Deidara is in full form now and he's shouting like a maniac at the auctioneer, and the auctioneer's hand has gone to his earpiece, and before he knows what's happening there are security guards and rough hands on his wrists and he's being ushered towards the exit. His painting is still on the slide. He doesn't know if bidding will continue.

"The fuck, Deidara!" he shouts when they're outside, and for once Deidara is furious enough to respond to his instigated argument. The fight tastes good in his mouth; it's been a long time coming, and he wants to go into it fists flying and arms pinwheeling and ripping out handfuls of Deidara's heavy blonde hair.

"What, Sasori, _what_? You took me to an auction to see you whoring out your paintings, or what? What the hell gave you the idea that I'd want to see that, yeah?!"

"I didn't take you there to see my painting!" protests Sasori. "I took you because I wanted you to look around and meet people so you finally could sell one of your own, and stop being such a damn freeloader!"

Deidara whirls around in the middle of the street, hair in disarray, and passerby stare at them and part their paths around them like a sea bending around two obstinate rocks. It's the middle of the evening and investment bankers are hurrying home down the twilight city streets, most of them back to empty apartments and full nightclubs or darkened houses in the suburbs. The city stretches around outside them, once such a dream to Sasori, with its unseen coffers of money and immortality, now just a venue for a fight in evening traffic.

"A _freeloader_?" screams Deidara. "I'm a _freeloader_? That's rich, yeah, coming from a fucking sellout who paints to pimp out his stuff to people who couldn't care less about art, about the beauty of the moment—"

"Would you listen to yourself? The beauty of the moment? What moment? You haven't painted anything in months! Your paintings are going to die with you in some fucking warehouse somewhere like animals, and no one's going to give a shit about them! What kind of life is that? What kind of immortality is that?"

"I don't _need _immortality, and I've been trying to tell you that! I don't need anything but my art, yeah!"

"You need me," snarls Sasori, and then it's right there in front of him, that silver line etched in the air that is never, never to be crossed in a fight, but he slashes it to pieces with his words and then it's gone like a wisp of cobweb. "You need my fucking apartment and my fucking money and my fucking _patronage_, don't you, Deidara? I can't believe you're talking about whoring anything out, because the only whore in this situation is—"

And then Deidara slaps him, crisp and sharp across his face—the sound almost musical in the sounds of hollow wind and cars on asphalt, like breaking strings on a great wooden instrument.

**~X~**

When Sasori had first asked Deidara to pose for a painting he had refused him, laughing as he lounged in bed and ran his hands through sweat-soaked ropes of golden hair.

"I hate being in paintings," he'd said, and Sasori had been so transfixed by the sight of sunlight on his slender tanned body that he hadn't argued, just asked why.

"It's the moment, yeah?" Deidara had replied. "It kind of trivializes the moment—trying to make it last forever and all that. I mean, if it's an important enough moment, it'll last forever anyway, won't it?"

And Sasori had watched him, a creature of gold and pale fire in his bed and in his apartment and in his life, and he had been inclined to agree. In those days he never looked at Deidara—he _beheld _him, with the same wonderment and slight disbelief he had seen people give stained glass windows in churches, waterfalls and crags of snowy mountains, forces of nature made real and crystallized in tangible objects—he had never understood the term, but he understood it then.

Deidara had been oblivious to his admiration, as he was to everything. Once in a while, he would acknowledge it—"You're too _intense_, Sasori; quit staring, yeah?"—and Sasori never knew how to tell him that the intensity came from the way he burned, steadily illuminating everything in his surroundings, and in the face of such a sun it was impossible to tear his eyes away.

He had started the painting anyway, despite Deidara's misgivings. He'd purchased a huge canvas, the largest he'd ever gotten—four by eight with a thick grain that made him feel like he was painting on sand. It was the first painting he'd done without blocking in colored pencil beforehand; he simply slashed across the canvas with a thick soft-leaded graphite pencil, making unbroken strokes for the sheaf of hair that fell over Deidara's eyes, the spontaneous anemone gestures of his long kinetic fingers, the upsweep of pale lashes as he cast his eyes upwards to burn Sasori's bones to the core.

Deidara hadn't cared, because after a while he'd grown bored with Sasori's routine—work from four to eight every day, then dinner, and then photograph and update his portfolio until midnight—and begun leaving the apartment, coming back sometimes in time for dinner, and sometimes late enough to intercept Sasori as he was leaving for class in the morning.

"Where do you go?" Sasori had asked one day, and Deidara had given him a look of such surprise, such alarm that he would ask, that he hadn't had the heart to pursue it.

"I have my own friends, yeah?" he'd said edgily some other day, and indeed it was true—the police commissioner's son, Itachi, who was private-school educated like Sasori and could sing and ballroom dance and play multiple instruments; Kisame, Itachi's muscular, dark-skinned roommate; Kakuzu and Hidan, party animals like Deidara whom he affectionately called the 'Zombie Brothers' and spent long hours with on the phone, discussing venues of shows and outrageous stunts for performance art nights.

Sasori never went to these things, but once he had let Deidara know he was free to invite them over, so Deidara did. They had a block party at the apartment, at which Deidara and Hidan and Kakuzu stockpiled so much alcohol Sasori spent the entire evening waiting for the stash to explode at the touch of a stray cigarette lighter, and at which loud students spilled drinks and vomited and generally dirtied up the immaculate pinewood floors of his art studio.

Sasori had spent most of the time conversing with Itachi, who was teetotal and stood elegantly in a corner instead of participating in the drunken antics of his roommate and Deidara's 'Zombie Brothers.' Sasori liked the dark-haired young man, who was impeccably well-mannered and displayed a strange refined comportment that brought to mind crystal vases and cigarette holders, so far removed from his conception of student life. Itachi had commented politely on the painting of Deidara, which had been almost finished at that point save for the expanse of white that would eventually become his hair.

"I'm waiting on a particular shade of yellow," Sasori had said, "Aureolin no. 40. It's hard to get in oils, but it's the only one that'll really work. I don't want to mix it myself."

"Why not?"

"Well—look at him," Sasori had said, and indeed Deidara's hair, with its vivid gold that was unlike any gold hair he had ever seen, was the most visible thing on the studio floor. Lit by the overhead lights and the reflected blue glare of the picture window, it shone like glass, like metal. "It's such a pure color. Mixing it would dilute it."

Itachi had given him a strange look then, but before he could say anything Kisame had lumbered up to them, holding Itachi's dun-colored winter coat and saying, "Itachi? Come on, let's get home—I know you don't like taking the subway," and Itachi had nodded gravely to Sasori and left.

Later Sasori had found that Deidara had left too, with a pretty blonde girl he hadn't known the name of, and when he stumbled back in the morning—red-eyed, with his pupils strangely dilated—Sasori had said nothing, just fixed him tea and a plate of eggs and let him curl up on the divan, yawning furiously.

"Damn," Deidara had said. "What a night, yeah?"

"I don't know," Sasori had replied frostily. "I wasn't involved."

And Deidara, who had never cared enough to fight, had simply picked up his eggs and tea and moved himself into the bedroom, where the sheets were still disheveled from whatever couple had occupied it the night before.

Later, when he'd achieved coherence and slept off the hangover from sex and booze and whatever else Sasori hadn't had the courage to confront, he'd informed him that his friends hadn't liked the painting. "Put my hair in, yeah? Right now I look like fucking Sephiroth or something, all that white—"

"I'm waiting on a color," Sasori had repeated. "The art store at the student co-op doesn't have it. But I'd prefer to get it exactly right, so I'm willing to wait."

"What color?"

"Aureolin no. 40."

"Oh right, right. Potassium cobalt nitrite, yeah," Deidara had said in a mocking voice, mimicking one of their professors with cruel accuracy. "Why don't you just use watercolor? It's in every watercolor set, yeah."

"It darkens, in watercolor. It doesn't stay the same color after a few years."

"A few years!" Deidara had laughed. "How long are you planning on keeping this painting, yeah?"

"It's a portrait of you, Deidara. I want to capture you exactly as you are now."

"Yeah," Deidara had said, flashing Sasori a washed-out version of his electric-shock smile. "So there's no point in trying, baby, 'cause I can't be captured. Not in pictures, not in paint—and you'd better remember it, yeah!"

It was one of those things that he laughed at then, and years later he would remember it again and not want to laugh at all.

**~X~ **

When they get home from the auction, Deidara goes straight to the bedroom, and Sasori sits at his easel and doesn't know what to draw.

The evening wears on around him; it's eight-thirty-nine and he should be working, but he has absolutely no impetus. It's as if whatever it was in him that forced the synapses in his arms to fire and guide paintbrush over paper has simply vanished, as electricity vanishes when the cord is disconnected and there is no connection that can give rise to creation. He just sits, and that's where he is when the phone rings and Itachi says he's in the area and would he like to have coffee?

He goes to the café where Itachi is and they sit in companionable quiet, discussing things like Itachi's latest project at the police headquarters and the enormous fish tank Kisame has just had installed. Itachi is courteous without being friendly, which is what Sasori wants right at this moment, so he listens and contributes to the sparse, comfortable flow of conversation as they sip lattes and inhale the steam rising from their cups, and Itachi doesn't ask where Deidara is because Sasori suspects that he might as well already know.

"How is the harp," Itachi says eventually, in his low regal curl of a voice, and Sasori finds that he suddenly doesn't want to have this conversation.

"I've been doing what you said," he replies finally. "So it's not going to explode, presumably."

"That is always a positive development."

They sip their coffees. Outside, the twilight turns to night, and the city that never sleeps rustles and stretches itself like a self-conscious girl preparing for a party. Several blocks away Sasori knows the performance art show is probably beginning in the student quadrangle, which is full of raucous students who have begun their careers in a flash of brilliant inspiration and will end them decades away, amidst beer cans and cigarette butts and the eternal stink of failure and poverty stirred together into a poignant cocktail of regret. The darkness washes against the windows of the café and colors it the deep blue of glass at night, so that Sasori can see nothing but his and Itachi's reflections.

"Deidara probably wants it to explode," he mutters, barely conscious of what he's saying. "That's what he likes about it—the fact that it's beautiful now and it can disappear any second. He actually _likes _that."

Itachi gives him that strange, intense look he gave him at the party so many months ago, but this time he finishes his sentence.

"You knew that from the beginning, Sasori."

"Yes. I did."

The coffee at the bottom of the cup is pure sugar; there's no longer any taste. Sasori sets his on the table and Itachi rises, conscious, perhaps, of having already taken up enough time. Despite his initial standoffishness, Itachi has always been considerate to a fault, and Sasori wonders how the hell someone like him became friends with Deidara, who blazes through doors and plans and lives without any consideration for others whatsoever.

Itachi pauses and reaches into his jacket pocket, from which he removes something—a metal tube, smaller than a tube of toothpaste but similar in appearance. He lays it down on the table.

"I thought I might stop at your student co-op on the way here," he says. "They have restocked, and I remembered that you wanted this."

It says _Aureolin no. 40._

At the apartment, Sasori squeezes the paint onto his palette and stirs it gently with the end of a paintbrush. The sharp acidic bite of turpentine rises from it, and he savors it for a moment before mixing it with a little water and drawing the first stroke of gold onto his brush.

When the paint touches the canvas, he actually has to suppress a shudder at its perfection—the color is so correct that he might as well have cut a window in the canvas and stared through it to Deidara's golden hair; it's so vibrant it doesn't look like paint at all. He paints in long vicious slashes, filling in the white, covering it with the yellow paint and relishing the snap of the paintbrush as it burns away the emptiness with its paleness. The paint actually seethes on the canvas. He strokes it all away, months of frustration, months of wondering where the hell Deidara's spent his evenings, months of gallery photography as Deidara sleeps soundly in the next room, months of anger, months of knowing that he's the only one who cares enough to notice that months have been going by at all. He strokes it away, and when he's done, he throws the brush down on his immaculate pinewood floor and lifts away the painting with shaking hands.

He knows better than anyone else that what he said to Deidara is a lie. Deidara doesn't need him; he's as happy in a hovel or a shack or a freezing student park as he is in Sasori's apartment, and he doesn't need to be there. One day it's likely he won't, because Sasori knows that like the harp, he's all delicate lines and explosive tension and it's very possible that he will simply vanish, in a brilliant blaze like the gold of his hair on the canvas, because that's his art and that's what he finds beautiful—the pure and savage possibility of hopeless eradication.

Sasori reaches towards the canvas and works his fingers into the still-wet paint, covering his fingers in the flaxen shade of Aureolin no. 40 as he once tangled them in Deidara's long, beautiful hair, as they rolled together on a huge sheet of paint-slick drafting paper and the sun came up all around them.

What he said to Deidara is a lie, but what Deidara said to him is a lie too—for now, at least, he has succeeded in capturing him exactly as he is.

**~X~**

_end_


End file.
